Kerry: Climate change is the biggest WMD of all

Ed MorrisseyPosted at 12:51 pm on February 17, 2014

Secretary of State John Kerry took time out of his global travels on expensive jet airplanes to remind people of the evils of … global warming. While Kerry tries to cut a deal with Iran that will supposedly stop the nation’s chief state sponsor of terrorism from obtaining nuclear weapons, he told students in Indonesia that the biggest weapon of mass destruction of all was anthropogenic climate change:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruFbyz6RsXk

“Think about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It doesn’t keep us safe if the United States secures its nuclear arsenal while other countries fail to prevent theirs from falling into the hands of terrorists,” Kerry told students at a high-tech U.S.-funded cultural center at a Jakarta mall.

Kerry added, “The bottom line is this: it is the same thing with climate change. In a sense, climate change can now be considered another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even the worlds most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”

Kerry then went on to tell Indonesians that their country will get swallowed up by climate change, and call for people to ignore skeptics about the supposedly conclusive science of global warming — referring to them as Flat Earth Society members:

“Because of climate change, it’s no secret that today Indonesia is…one of the most vulnerable countries on Earth,” Kerry said. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that the entire way of life that you live and love is at risk.”

Kerry went on to deride scientists and citizens who challenge global warming’s scientific validity.

“We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts,” said Kerry. “The science is unequivocal, and those who refuse to believe it are simply burying their heads in the sand. We don’t have time for a meeting anywhere of the Flat Earth Society.”

That must be how science works, right? People declare that a scientific theory is proven, and then silence all those who question it. Wait, what? The scientific method requires questions and testing of theories and models? Who knew?

Speaking of models, the current plateau in warming despite the continuing release of carbon into the atmosphere is going on 16 years now, almost utterly outside the range of AGW models’ potential calculations. That question arose this summer, even before the cold winter in 2014. The rate of warming had nearly stopped after 1998, which challenged all of the assumptions of CO2-based warming, let alone deal with the question of optimum temperature. We still haven’t reached the same temperature levels as seen in the Roman Empire, for instance, nor is Greenland a farming opportunity as it was in the medieval era.

The demand to stop asking questions and testing the theory isn’t science-based; it’s political. The more that politicians demand that people stop questioning their use of the hypotheses of AGW for their preferred policies of top-down control of energy production, the more obvious those politics become.